Occasionally I see a take on the internet, and get real twitchy about it for a moment. This morning, it was a post about if puzzles are board games. Thus the twitching began.
The first thing I want to ask is, “Why are we asking this question?” That’s not superfluous, or being rude, it’s an important distinction.
The first response to the original question on Bluesky links to the Board Game Geek game criteria page. It is a very nice page, and I especially enjoy how it puts puzzles out of scope in one moment, and then puts escape rooms, a collection of puzzles, back in scope paragraphs later.
But the BGG page has a specific purpose. They want to limit and filter what sorts of products end up on their website, because they do not want to just have a list of everything. It’s a valid reason to define what a board game is, and to decide that a puzzle is not a board game for their purposes.
Let’s look at two others real quick. A friend asks you to bring something for board game night. You bring a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle. Are folks going to be happy?
Probably depends on the friend group. But I’m leaning towards, “No.”
What about sorting things for a store? Do puzzles go with the board games? In my experience, often the answer is, “Yes,” though that might have more to do with packaging and distributor than content. But the last few times I’ve been in a store, the puzzles sit right next to the copies of Cards Against Humanity.
So going back to the original question, what I want to ask is: Why does it matter if a puzzle is a board game? Are you stocking a store? Giving a gift? Setting up a web page? Because that context is going to change the answer.
Why am I being twitchy about this?
I don’t like it when people define words around art and art adjacent spaces in such a way as to exclude certain things from being in that category. To do that, there needs to be a good reason for it.
The usual reason for folks doing that is to exclude a category of other people from being in their in-group. The prime example of this is “gamers” claiming that The Sims and Animal Crossing aren’t “real games,” but I’m sure their are plenty others. That’s not a good reason, it’s just being a gatekeeping asshole. Now, I don’t think the original question on Bluesky was posted to gatekeep. But gatekeeping is why my brain decided to do the record scratch noise, and spend 40 minutes on this garbage writeup.
This year at PAX East, I got a chance to meet some of the folks doing Speed Puzzling. Presumably the speed part is what elevates it to the level of board game, but it was something fun and neat that I’d never heard of before. It’s also something that would never show up on BGG.
I’d rather that board game enthusiasts had space for weird stuff that does not in fact conform to neat tables of rules, or perfect definitions. I’d rather we had more In Memory Of sorts of things.
Okay, but are puzzles board games?
A sandwich is a piece of meat between two slices of bread.
Is this a sandwich?
Which is to say: it doesn’t matter without additional context!
Someone who’s very hungry might be happy to have a hot dog after asking for a sandwich. Someone who catered a sandwich tray for a work event might be slightly less enthusiastic to receive sixty Costco hot dogs.
Ed Note: This article uses a few specific bits of terminology related playing limited Magic: The Gathering, mostly the acronym B.R.E.A.D. If you’re not familiar with the term/acronym, a brief read of this Stack overflow paragraph defines them well.
I participated in the first Regional Championship Qualifier at The Fourth Place over the weekend. As this is one of the more competitive events I’ve ever done, I thought I’d talk about the experience.
This was a Limited RCQ, starting with 5 rounds of sealed, and then cutting to Top 8 for a draft. The set for both was Foundations. But before I get into the event, let’s talk about prep!
Prep
I…. did not prep much. I prepped more than I have for most other sealed events I’ve done, but much less than I could have. I reviewed a fair number of sealed pools, I looked at some articles, and I did two drafts of the set prior. The first draft was on Arena, and I lost every single match quite badly. The second was a smaller in-person event where I won.
I do think the prep made a difference, but I also think especially in the draft, I could have done much better with my picks. More on that later.
Sealed
For the sealed portion of the event, this was the deck I ended up building.
After opening all my packs I was pretty confident I would end up in green. I had bombs in Scavenging Ooze, Mossborn Hydra, Sylvan Scavenging, and Ghalta, Primal Hunger. I also had removal in Bushwhack and Bite Down, and and a few giant growths.
My secondary color wasn’t as clear.
Looking at the rest of the pool, I scratched off white and blue as secondaries. They didn’t offer the bombs of red or black, and had limited amounts of mediocre removal.
Red had two big bombs in Shivan Dragon and Twinflame Tyrant, but it didn’t have any targeted removal before 5 mana, and even then, it wasn’t instant speed.
Black won out as a secondary color on the strength of its removal (Eaten Alive, and 2x Bake Into A Pie), and the fact that it still provided a very solid bomb in High-Society Hunter. My read at the time was that I had plenty of bombs in green, and more removal would serve me better in the sealed Environment.
Looking back at the pool now, I do think there was a strong argument for green/red, but that wasn’t choice I made at the time.
I made two spicy decisions in the deckbuilding. The first was not splashing for Twinflame Tyrant, despite having a Campus Guide and three Evolving Wilds.
I think this was the right choice. Twinflame is two red pips, and my deck has 8~ (more on this in a moment) double pip cards. It was much more important to fix my base so that I could drop my double pip bombs, than it was to enable a single additional bomb at the cost of less consistency.
The second decision was including Cackling Prowler over Dwynen, Gilt-Leaf Daen. This was a mistake, and it was a mistake that I would proceed to fix the entire night, swapping the two after pretty much every game 1. I thought that the ward 2 on Prowler was more important than reach on Dwynen. I was very wrong. There are a lot of flyers in this set, and something that can deal with the birds was more important than something that took an extra two mana to blow up.
Matches
Generally speaking, this is where I would talk about matches. Unfortunately, after playing 9 hours of magic in a row, I don’t remember my opponents’ decks, and I did not take notes.
So instead, here are a few fun moments!
One opponent got out Extravagant Replication. This didn’t worry me, until suddenly they had four copies of Spitfire Lagac.
In another game, I was forced to burn 3 cards in Ambush Wolf, Giant Growth, and Bushwhack and seven life just to deal with Sire of Seven Deaths. I still lost somehow. Maybe it was the 3 for 1 and 14 life differential. Who can say.
Finally, in my last set of games, despite mostly being deadweight every other match, Revenge of the Rats finally did some work, giving me enough fodder to sac into Vampire Gourmand to push through, and get enough cards to recover from an incredibly bad situations.
Ultimately, I finished with a record of 3 – 1 -2, which was enough to put me into the top 8.
Deck
1 Authority of the Consuls
1 Bake into a Pie
1 Day of Judgment
1 Exsanguinate
1 Felidar Savior
1 Healer's Hawk
1 Infestation Sage
1 Macabre Waltz
3 Make Your Move
2 Marauding Blight-Priest
2 Midnight Snack
9 Plains
1 Sanguine Syphoner
1 Skyknight Squire
1 Stromkirk Bloodthief
8 Swamp
1 Vampire Soulcaller
3 Vanguard Seraph
1 Youthful Valkyrie
Sideboard
2 Aegis Turtle
1 Archmage of Runes
1 Ashroot Animist
1 Bigfin Bouncer
1 Cackling Prowler
1 Consuming Aberration
1 Fleeting Distraction
1 Good-Fortune Unicorn
1 Grappling Kraken
1 Lightshell Duo
1 Mossborn Hydra
2 Run Away Together
1 Slumbering Cerberus
1 Sure Strike
If you are looking at this list with some level of confusion and profanity, I promise you. There is an explanation for why there is so much blue, when I am not even in the color. It is not a good explanation, because it was not made via good decisions. But there is an explanation, and it’s Consuming Aberration.
I have a bad habit, one that I may now be cured of purely as a result of how horrible this draft went. If the rare in the first pack looks like a bomb, I will take it. And then I will continue to try to pick into those colors, even if I really, really shouldn’t.
As a result, there are a lot of blue cards in this pool, instead of anything remotely useful or good.
There is a second card in this pack that tells a story, and it’s this.
This was not a first pick. It was a much later pick. And should probably have been a sign to me that not a single person at the table was going green/red. Did I listen to this sign? Did I pick the two Mossborn Hydras that were passed me to me, and the other strong red cards?
No. Of course I didn’t.
Instead, after, picking up a Day of Judgment and an Authority of Consuls, and proceeded to try to force Black/White as hard as possible in packs 2-3 to salvage the situation.
Top 8 Matches
I don’t know if the universe took pity on me, or if everyone at the table was having a rough time, but I did in fact manage to squeak through round one before being eliminated handily in round 2.
For round 1, I had an incredible stroke of luck, getting Authority of Consuls early into a blue/white go-wide deck in both games. This was an incredible bit of bad fortune for them, as it pretty much single-handedly turned off their deck’s ability to flash in Resolute Reinforcements to stall me. It also allowed me to get extra turns of ping in, as even when they got their larger flyers, they came in tapped.
Round 2, however, was the buck finally stopped. My opponent was playing midrange Grixis, with a fair amount of threshold dependent cards, and I just got stomped. While the games were slogs, they managed to both get board presence with a bunch of fairly useful cards, and even Day of Judgement couldn’t save me from Sphinx of Forgotten Lore, and Kioara, the Rising Tide, resulting in me going down in two consecutive losses.
While I didn’t stick around to watch finals, it did look like both players were playing three color decks, something I thought was interesting.
Tone and Overall Thoughts
My goal for the event was to get into the Top 8. This might sound intimidating, until you realize it was capped at 20 entries, meaning it was really more of a “Finish in the top 40%”.
I made a lot of mistakes. By my count, I’d put it at something like 4-5 misplays, and that’s not even counting missed triggers. Arena has made me very good at spotting play options, and outs. But it’s made me very bad at keeping track of my own triggers, and asking to hold priority at turn end.
My prep did help. I don’t know how much, but it did make a difference in some of the deck building, and knowing that certain cards I would have otherwise written off were actually bombs.
My draft was terrible. I had exactly 23 cards in my colors, and no fixing.
Generally speaking, this was a pretty chill and polite event, and I hope even the more competitive events at The Fourth Place stay this way. There was no shouting, and no real issues/conflicts, with players generally being polite but firm on various rulings.
This was a good event, and I wish I was more excited about the top 4 finish, but as I’m me, anything other than complete victory will always feel like a bit of a wash. I do think I’d try another Sealed RCQ though, as long as the set was good.
PS. The counts on this sealed pool look wonky at first, but this pool does not include 6 lands I opened, and the also the system doesn’t seem to like to count lands. But was 84 cards, as I’ve spent all morning double checking to make sure I got it right. It’s a similar case for the draft pool, as I didn’t include the lands.
I play a lot of things that don’t end up on the blog. Sometimes it’s because the game is too small, sometimes because the game is too big. In either case, I still want to talk about them briefly before PAX Unplugged happens, and they are swept into the great void.
Wilmot’s Warehouse
Wilmot’s Warehouse is fundamentally a game about organization. As such I feel a that something should be noted before I give my thoughts on it.
From where I am sitting writing this, if I turn my head to the left, I can see, on top of each other, the following: 1. A hammer 2. A large set of strength cables 3. A cardboard box for wallmounting, and a variety of other objects.
If I crane to the right, I can see sketchbooks, notebooks, self help books, and computers, all stacked together. Should I manage to owl, and do a full 180 degree turn, I would see a table that has on it trading cards, dice, more notebooks, and uncashed checks. In front of me, on my computer desk, in addition to my mouse and keyboard, I see duct tape, a key, business cards, and in-game reward codes that haven’t been redeemed.
All of which is to say, organizing things is not something I do well in real life. As a result, when it is a primary game mechanic, and I’m asked to do it VERY QUICKLY I do not experience what I would call joy. Instead, I experience a set of emotions I tend to associate with work meetings with clients, and performance reviews.
It’s a very clever little game, but it’s absolutely not for me. It’s a puzzle game where the first part of the puzzle is realizing that there is a puzzle.
Of the items on this list, Wilmot’s Warehosue is the probably the one that deserves its own writeup the most, but because it just isn’t for me, it’ll probably never get one.
UFO 50
Remember those old “200 games in 1” bootleg ass CD’s? Or maybe those Plug-N-Play machines with a bunch of random garbage on them?
UFO-50 is kind of like that, but if all the games were good. Or at least interesting.
I’d like to do a full writeup on the game at some point, but the reality of it is that it’s a huge pain to try to beat all of them. I’ve actually only beat like 5 of them, and with perfect clears on 4.
And frankly, while I don’t enjoy everything in UFO 50, I only feel like I had to find 6-7 I really liked for it to be worth it. Also, if 50 games feels overwhelming, here are a few of my favorites.
#9 Attactics – Real time unit placement. #12 Avaianos – A 4X game with scythe action selection style upgrades. (IE, each turn you worship a god, which gives a set of actions, and you get to upgrade those actions each time you select a god.) #46 Party House – A clever little roguelike bag builder. #24 Caramel Caramel – Cute little Shmup that I’m really bad at.
Zenless Zone Zero
I actually wrote 60% of a post on Zenless Zone Zero, took a break figuring I could put it up in a few months, and in that time they apparently completely removed one of the core systems I’d described. This would have required me to go back and play more of the game to actually figure out what the current experience was like, something I didn’t feel like doing.
I’m going to put the opening here, because it captures my feeling on the game pretty sufficiently.
It was the best of games, it was the worst of games, it was a brilliant spectacle fighter RPG with puzzle elements, it was a high production slot machine, it was the future of free to play, it was the end of the live-service bubble, it offered joyful combat and a fun story, it offered obnoxious time gated farming – in short, the game was so much like Genshin Impact that the critic wondered if he should just link to that writeup instead.
I played like 40 hours, and honestly, the first 20-30 are pretty fun, but once I hit the end of that, I ended up in the typical “grind your dailies” portion of every F2P game that exists. Now, in ZZZ, the dailies/weeklies are boss fights against excavators fused with ghost devils, and rogue-like style dungeon crawls, but they’re still dailies.
So once it became clear that I’d finished the story that was available, and everything required a daily grind, I just moved on.
And while I’m talking about F2P games, friends of mine have been playing a bunch of The First Descendant, and Throne and Liberty. The First Descendant is pretty much just “What if Warframe was REALLY horny?” and Throne and Liberty is a pay2win Korean MMO, so I don’t actually care what the game play is like.
But hey, they’ve played like a billion hours of each, and had fun, so who am I to judge?
Chained Together
Rage games are an interesting genre, things like Getting Over It or Jump King. Chained Together is a rage game you play with your friends.
Fortunately, it also has checkpoints, or I would not have beaten it.
There isn’t a lot to say on this one. I think part of the reason that Sexy Hiking and Getting Over It were so well received is because they were doing something new, if nothing else. Jump King is sort of in a similar space, in that no one had make a game with quite those mechanics.
Getting Over It in particular seems to want to talk a lot about the nature of what the game itself is.
But something about 3D rage games has always felt a bit… cheap to me? They feel like they were cobbled together out of Unity store assets to make a quick buck, and get streamers to play them.
In either case, we beat it in about 5 hours. (With checkpoints) It’s a good enough game if you want to grab 3 friends to do something stupid on a Friday, and no one can decide if you want to play Jackbox or not.
Vagrant Song
I started a writeup on Vagrant Song, and it was mostly vitriol. I did not find this game worth playing, and after a bit, even it’s outwardly charming art started to piss me off. After all, what’s the point of rubber-hose style art, if it’s NOT MOVING?
I only played the first 3 fights, which took about 6-7 hours total, and during that time I found it a pretty mediocre multiplayer boss fight sort of thing.
I legitimately do not understand who Vagrantsong is for. Like, seriously. You want a replayable multiplayer roguelike based on positioning and combos? It’s called Inkbound. You want roleplaying and turn based combat? Play 5E. You want better turn based combat? Play Pathfinder.
You want a mediocre campaign game that takes too long to play, that feels like an extended GM-less boss rush with limited agency to accelerate the fight?
Good news!
I have a copy of Vagrantsong I’m looking to sell.
If anyone ever tells me that they love Vagrantsong, I am going to have to stifle a little voice inside my head that wants to respond by asking if they’ve played any other tabletop or video game in the last 20 years.
I did Ludum Dare again! Ludum Dare 56 to be exact. The Big Battle for Tiny Mouse City was my entry, and I got it “finished” about an hour before the cutoff time.
Click above to play it!
It’s a short little RPG that takes less then 30 minutes to complete. You run around gathering party members, and grabbing weapons to fight the final boss. If I’m being honest, there’s not much here that hasn’t been done in a RPG before, and I’m sure another game has done the “Party of a dozen characters” gimmick before as well.
This writeup covers my thoughts on the experience, where things went well, where they didn’t, and what I’d do differently if I could.
This was my first time doing a game jam solo. As a result, I decided to use RPG Maker MV. The RPG Maker “engine” is a weird one. It’s been used to develop some cult classics, including To The Moon, and Fear & Hunger. It’s also mostly javascript, the editor crashes more than anyone could want, and I have a hard time trying to get it to do anything complex.
For a game jam, though, it offered huge advantages. It comes with a complete structure for making a classic RPG, has placeholder art and assets, and there are a large number of community-developed plugins. It also made it very easy to create a web-hostable build.
So with engine decided, and the theme of “Tiny Creatures,” I decided I wanted to do a classic RPG. The twist was that instead of leveling up, you just get a massive party of characters. In my mind, this was gonna be like 20 characters in a party. After a reality check on the level of effort per party member, I cut it down to 12.
My loop was going to be simple: run around and talk to people to add them to your party, find weapons and equip them, and then fight through a few enemies on a quest to get to the final boss.
So around 12:00 on Saturday, this was my design document.
This was it. This was the entire design.
The Implementation
And here’s the finished product. As you can see, it’s actually pretty similar. My initial idea was that the game would have two “halves”, separated by a mid-boss, and then a final boss at the end. In between, the player would recruit new members into their party, pick up weapons, and fight a few trash mobs.
That said, quite a few things changed between the initial idea, my incredible design document, and the final game.
The first big thing was the starting room, or Tutorial Room.
After I continually failed to equip weapons when playtesting, I realized that players would also mess it up. This is important, because it is impossible for any character to deal damage without a weapon equipped. So I made a room that forces the player to find a sword and equip the sword to leave it. This opening has the subtlety and grace of truck nuts, but from the comments I’ve seen on the game, I think it worked.
It also has a little bit of info about where the player can find a special party member. It’s a small clue, but hopefully it helped someone.
A fight, followed by a friend.
Once the player exits the room, they’re immediately greeted with a path that leads to an enemy encounter. After the enemy encounter, they reach a NPC that joins their party. Again, mallet over the head. But given the short length of the game, I wanted players to immediately understand the recruitment mechanic, since all but one of the mouse characters on the map will join the player once talked to.
Side Note: Initially the friendly mouse next to the fight was actually off to the side, but a friend of mine walked by them in play-testing, so I decided to force the player to interact with them.
One of the big things I really want to talk about is the tan path.
I added the path in passing, but it ended up being perfect. The path leads to 3 things: two special mice, the Healer and Alchemist, and the game’s mid and final bosses. The path grounded the game, which otherwise was just a bunch of square green rooms. If the player follows it down a route they haven’t gone, they will find something new.
Subtlety, my name is not.
That said, I wanted the player to explore a bit, so there’s a bunch of weapon chests and recruitable NPC’s just off the path. There are also a few very direct instructions to look for things off the path, and places where the player can see something off the path from further away. The most obvious was the sign above.
Still, it does bring me to my biggest failure in the game: the mid boss.
Conceptually, I wanted to have a big mean rat that gives a speech in the middle of the town, with their acolytes flocking around. I wanted a whole little cutscene, and build up, to keep the player interested.
Oh mid boss, I failed you. I failed you so hard.
But I didn’t get the time. Even his battle and world sprite are pretty last minute.
This is a problem. From a player retention standpoint, the mid boss is the first “big” exciting thing the player sees after the start the game. It should be a moment that encourages them to keep playing. But as it stands, it’s pretty dull. There aren’t really any “Big” moments after him, just a few more fights, and some treasure.
So what should have been a “Oh, I can’t wait to see what happens next” moment, turned into a “I’ve seen enough, time to rate the game” moment.
That said, I’m much more pleased with the final boss.
Here comes the boy.
Catmagedon has their own theme music. They have their own big scary overworld sprite. They have a little tiny cutscene before the fight, and I pumped their damage high enough that they actually feel scary to fight.
I’m actually on the fence about their battle sprite. I think I needed to remove the battleback, and simplify it a bit, because like… yeah, that don’t look like no cat.
They’re probably the high point of the game, and even with the wonky menu, and weird interactions, I think they probably felt fun.
Lessons Learned
One thing I learned from this experience is why RPG’s don’t usually have a party over 4: it makes the game quite a slog. I actually cut all enemy HP by about 20% late on Sunday because fights were taking too long. I didn’t want people to quit out of boredom. It’s a fun gimmick, but I don’t think it’s a good way to model a mob of characters.
The second thing was that I am always biting off more than I can chew. I thought I could do a single map RPG with no leveling up in 3 days. I still had to cut a player character, custom tile maps, face plates for dialogue, most of the mid boss, and 2 enemy types to finish on time.
It was also a good reminder that players don’t know anything you don’t tell them. I occasionally grouse about over tutorialization, but it’s necessary.
It’s also an interesting opportunity to look back at my previous entry and ask if I’ve used any of those lessons learned. I think the answer is yes. I was much more consistent about tutorials, and beating the player over the head with mechanics.
What would I do differently?
I should have forced the player to save before the final boss, in case they died. I also wish I’d “smoothed” the map design a bit more. Specifically, I wish I had pulled parts of the map in closer together. Here’s an example.
Smoothed design, where I cut down the total space significantly.
Unsmoothed design, it’s a significantly longer walk off the beaten path to find those chests.
I’ve already talked about the mid boss at length, but I think I know how I’d fix him now. While I’m happy with most of the art, I wish I’d done a second pass on the player sprite to fix its left/right direction, and its ears.
Conclusion
For someone who spends so much time on unfinished projects that never see the light of day, it’s nice to actually complete something for once, even in an imperfect form. I hope people have some fun with it.
I’m not sure that I’ll return to the game in any large scale, but I may make a “directors cut” version with some fixes and quality of life changes after voting finishes for games.
That said, we’ve had 3 weeks of “not game reviews” on the blog. After this last post, it’s time to return to your regularly scheduled blog posts: those of games and game reviews.
Thanks for reading and thanks to anyone who played my little game.
Disclaimer: This post uses real names, and talks about an ongoing conflict. If after reading it, you feel strongly that one side or the other is in the right here, I urge you to channel that feeling into support for that side’s project. Do not harass or make personal attacks against anyone.
Four years ago at PAX East, I played a demo for a game called Sento Fighter. It was a match 3, 1v1 dueling game with a marble selection system, designed by Brother Ming. It was under contract to be published by Penguin & Panda Games. Due to Penguin & Panda’s mismanagement of other projects, it would never go to production.
Just under a year ago, at PAX East, I demoed a game called Power Well. It was a match 3, 1v1 dueling with a marble selection system, being developed by Red Planet Games. Red Planet Games was clear with me that it was inspired by Sento Fighter, and initially, right after PAX, Ming was positive about the game.
This past Sunday, the CEO of Red Planet Games, Martin Myles, put up an 8,000 word post accusing Ming of extortion, and calling him a bully. Ming responded by calling Myles a hack who refused to credit him and announcing that he had acquired the rights back to Sento Fighter, and would be publishing it as Re;MATCH. Ming also included a 12-item list of shared mechanics between the games.
So what on Earth happened, and how did we get here?
In the last few days, what began as a private disagreement between Brother Ming (designer of Sento Fighter), and Myles Martin (CEO of Red Plant Games) about whether Brother Ming should be credited as a game designer on Red Planet’s game Power Well, has turned into a full on public feud. This writeup is intended to lay out a timeline for what led to these events, and give some additional context.
Since I don’t want it to get buried, here’s my personal opinion:
1. Brother Ming deserves designer credit for Power Well.
2. Nobody here has publicly broken any laws or committed any crimes. Even if Red Planet Games publishes Power Well and doesn’t credit Brother Ming, they won’t have committed a crime.
3. Taking all participants at their word, I view this mess as more the result of incredibly unfortunate miscommunication and questionable legal ownership of the design than anything else. I’d like to believe no one here set out to rip someone else off without credit, even if this probably paints me as quite foolish.
This is my opinion as of 9/25/24, and it’s quite possible it changes if more information comes out.
Timeline
It’s 2018. Brother Ming begins prototyping a game called Orb Strikers. The rights to Orb Strikers will later be licensed to Jason Moughon for $10,000 and renamed to Sento Fighter.
Jason Moughon is the CEO of publisher Penguin and Panda, and later Big Kid Games. Penguin and Panda successfully funded Kickstarter campaigns for several games, notably Onimaru. Onimaru was expected to deliver in 2019.
P&P failed to fulfill this campaign in a timely manner. There is mixed opinion on Jason Moughan in the board game community. Many backers for projects he ran feel that they have been scammed. They point at his behavior of setting up Big Kid Games after P&P acquired a poor reputation. Other individuals feel that Jason ended up in over his head, and failed to correctly manage the costs of production and delivery, not that he set out to scam people.
But in 2020 Jason still has his reputation intact. Penguin and Panda is demoing Sento Fighter at multiple game conventions, including PAX East and PAX South. Myles plays it, and really enjoys it. He’s excited to see the final product.
Things continue to get worse for Penguin and Panda throughout 2021. They continue to fail to fulfill Onimaru, and some of their distribution partners begin to disavow them, as can be seen here in an archived post from Japanime Games.
As a result, Sento Fighter is never crowdfunded or produced, and exists purely as a Board Game Geek page, a mailing list sign up page, a private Tabletop Simulator Mod, a few photos from conventions, a Penny Arcade post and a single two hour liveplay from collective content group Love Thy Nerd.
Over the next few years, Brother Ming attempts to buy back the rights to Sento Fighter so he can continue development and publish the game, but is rebuffed by Jason.
In 2023, Myles Martin is chatting with his brother, and the two end up discussing Sento Fighter, and wondering what happened to it. After failing to find any info, they decide to attempt to recreate the game. They name their group Red Planet Games.
In January of 2024, the Red Planet Games team feels they have a strong game to demo. They end up getting a booth at PAX East. Brother Ming first learns about Power Well through direct messages from players at PAX East, and is immediately worried that the game is somehow connected to Jason Moughan. This suspicion is largely irrelevant to the rest of the events that follow, except that it does serve to illustrate the miscommunication that will occur between Myles and Ming.
They connect over Discord, and then over the next several months, they will continue to sporadically message, and even get dinner. Unfortunately, while this could have served to defuse the situation, they mostly piss each other off. Below are a few examples.
Ming comes in initially somewhat suspicious of Jason being involved, as Jason has a history of trying to start new companies to dodge his bad reputation. It’s not helped by the fact that Myles has made really nice prototypes. Miscommunication #1
Ming tweets about the game to Jerry Holkins, AKA Tycho Brahe, writer for Penny Arcade and founder of PAX. Myles takes this as a sort of attempted flex on him and Red Planet, as opposed to the “Yo, this shit is cool” that it is. Miscommunication #2
Ming asks Myles to consider hiring the original Sento Fighter artist to do some of the artwork. Myles has a family member doing the art, and so instead takes this request as an insult. Miscommunication #3
Ming makes suggestions about the ethnicities of the characters. Myles feels that Ming is trying to tell him how to make his game. Ming feels that Myles is taking his own work, and removing his impact on it. There’s a larger discussion here that I’m not qualified to comment on, but I will note that this sort of discussion often comes up between designers and publishers during contract negotiation. Miscommunication #4
Ming and Myles get dinner to try to sort of calm things down. While there are no “Chat logs” for dinner, Myles comes away from the experience feeling personally attacked. Miscommunication #5!
Ming notes that Jason might be litigious. Myles decides he needs to make sure his project is above board legally, and will later hire lawyers for advice. This single moment is the match that will ultimately torch any hope of this being resolved amicably.
This all continues to just simmer, right until July 5th where things finally kick off.
But first….
A Brief Note on Legal Matters within the Board Game Industry
I’m not a lawyer. This is not discussing what the law is when it comes to board games, but the current state of how the law seems to actually work here in September of 2024, in the United States. At least in regards to small and medium size board game publishers and designers.
There are a lot of open and expensive questions about the nature of things like copyright, patents, and just the general mess that is intellectual property when it comes to board games. However, unlike the video game industry, nobody in board games has any money. So, nobody sues each other, because they don’t have the money to spend on the lawsuits, and even if they won, it’s unlikely they would recoup their costs.
The end result is that because the industry is so small, everything gets decided in the court of public opinion. If you can convince everyone a game ripped you off, you don’t need to sue anyone. You just convince the public and many people won’t buy the games, because again, this industry is tiny.
Is this good? No. It gives large companies outsized ability to pressure and control terms, while leaving the actual legal questions in limbo because no one can afford to litigate. It allows small scale rip-offs, and copying of games from outside territories. It results in a lot of drama. But it is how things actually currently work.
And now, a second brief bit of context setting.
Designers, Developers, and Publishers in Board Games
The court of public opinion in board game development is a result of norms that exist because of the board game industry’s small size. But it’s not the only weird norm. One easy example to point at is the fact that no one is asked to sign NDA’s at things like Unpub, or for playtests. After all, a legally binding contract doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the money to enforce it (or if the IP doesn’t legally exist).
Another example is the importance of credit, and properly having credit assigned. Again, this is a small industry. Credit on projects is a resume, and proof of prior work. But different types of credit mean different things. Here’s a very brief overview of some of those types of credit.
Game Designer – This is the person who did the work for most of the game systems, and what is seen as the bulk of the game design work. They made the prototypes, they conceived of the systems.
Publisher – The publisher, on the other hand, often does all of the “not game design” work. This can include, but is not limited to marketing, production, final art, distribution deals. It might also include things like re-theming, or artistic character design. It’s a huge amount of work, which is why game designers often sell their designs to publishers in the first place.
Game Developer – The developer, then, is a sort of intermediary between the two. They often, but not always, work for a publisher. Their job is to take the core elements that a designer has created and bring them to a production-ready state. This can include designing some small mechanical elements of the game, or redesigning systems or themes, or even adding or removing existing mechanics. It’s a complex job and necessary job, but it mostly involves working with a core system they’ve already been given.
The Events of July 5th
Myles’ accusations against Ming stem from this discussion. I’m going to break this down with some images.
This is Ming’s first request.
He asks for 3 things.
1. Credit as a game designer on the Project
2. $1500 to license a character from one of Ming’s other games to the project.
3. A written contract stating they will pay him $3000 if Power Well is successful enough to merit an expansion. There is no guarantee that the game will be.
Myles makes the following counter offer of $4,500, for:
1. A license for a Re:Act Character 2. The ability to provide a non-designer credit for the work Brother Ming did 3. A thank you in the rulebook 4. Brother Ming will stop making any public statements about Power Well in a negative connotation.
Critically, Myles does not want to give Brother Ming a designer credit on Power Well. In his public post, Myles justifies this based on his concern he will open himself up to a lawsuit from Penguin and Panda if he does so.
Brother Ming believes he is entitled to this credit as he designed the core systems that at a bare minimum inspired Power Well.
Ming does not like this offer, primarily because it results in him not being credited as a game designer. He responds with the following counter offer primarily intended to point out how ridiculous it was to not give him designer credit. (Ming has since retrospectively noted that this was “a dumb plan”. )
1. Red Planet Games will pay Ming $11,500 dollars. $10,000 for the design, and $1500 to license a character from Re;Act
2. Red Planet Games will not have to credit Ming as a Designer on the project.
3. All terms from the above discussion.
Myles, after consulting his own industry sources, decides not to respond.
On August 5th, post Gen Con, Ming reaches out to try to explain why the game designer credit is important to him. Unfortunately, while Ming is being sincere, it’s easy to see how someone (Myles) would see this as condescending.
In essence, Ming is trying to get Myles to understand that from his point of view, Red Planet Games has done is mostly development and publishing work, and as such, Ming is owed designer credit.
On August 7th, Myles responds to Ming. He feels attacked by Ming. He does not feel that Ming is a designer on Power Well. He also feels that because Ming sold the game to Jason, Ming isn’t entitled to any more money for the design, and that he has done enough already.
Ming makes one last attempt to convince him. Myles does not respond.
On August 7th, Brother Ming tweets about not receiving credit, and posts a cropped portion of the final message from Myles. This cropped portion does not include the discussion of costs/payment.
Around September 11th, a long term detractor of Brother Ming succeeded in getting one of Ming’s projects DMCA’ed by Nintendo. This individual is not affiliated with Red Planet Games. Ming believes this is the result of the feud with Red Planet Games, though this mostly a matter of personal opinion. While this individual has bragged about this “achievement” on the Red Planet Games Discord, there is absolutely nothing to suggest Red Planet had any involvement in the DMCA request.
In response to Ming’s tweets on August 7th, on September 22nd, Myles posts the document outlining his interactions with Ming.
On September 24th, Ming announces that he has reacquired the rights to Sento Fighter, and plans to relaunch the game as Re;MATCH, and that he will make a public statement in the next few days.
On September 25th, Ming posts his statement. He’s generally in agreement on the timeline, but clarifies several notable points, including his concern around ethnicity of the characters in the game, his actual intentions with the $10,000 offer, and notably lays out a 12 point list of similarities between the two games.
Now that I’ve laid out the publicly provided information of both Myles and Ming, I’m entering the realm of personal opinion.
The Court of (my) Public Opinion
In the time since Myles has posted his statement on the 22nd, I’ve run it past my industry contacts, and some folks in their circles.
Myles chose to put this into the “Court of Public Opinion.” I suspect he’s not going to like the response he gets, especially among designers and small publishers.
Their general take is as follows: While the whole situation is messy, and at some points could have been handled better, Ming is in the right here. Folks have tended to feel that Myles’ statement is not as exonerating as Myles had hoped. To be clear, this was before even seeing Ming’s side of the story.
It’s not a universal opinion. There are people who feel that the distance in time is enough to justify what Red Planet Games have done. But there are even more who feel that it crosses a line to rebuild a game that you already know exists, and try to bring it to market.
While Myles views the work that his team has done as comparable to cloning a video game, that’s not how the board game industry is likely to see it. Instead, it appears to them that Myles is attempting to rip off someone else’s design, refusing to pay or give them credit, and then rush it to market as a product, not for the love of making games.
Like I said earlier, I’d like to think no one set out to be an asshole here. I’d prefer to believe that Myles’ lack of familiarity with the industry has led him to cross a lot of lines he may not have been familiar with. Frankly, that probably will do nothing but make me look like a naive idiot to both sides. So be it.
That said, while I’m going to try to keep my distance here, I’m going to make one big suggestion to Red Planet Games: Ban the person who has been attempting to harass Ming and DMCA Ming’s projects from your Discord server.You’re doing yourself absolutely no favors by even passively giving the appearance of endorsing the actions of someone who uses anonymous harassment and legal threats as a cudgel against others.
What Red Planet Games has done is generally against industry norms, but they have every legal right to produce and sell Power Well, and never mention Ming again. I don’t think they should.
Why I’m Writing This
I’ve been following both of these projects for quite some time, and I was initially enthusiastic about both. My (frankly terrible) writeup on Sento Fighter is one of the earliest posts on this blog. I was really looking forward to Power Well.
I feel strongly that Brother Ming deserves credit on Power Well for his work that the game very clearly, at a minimum, cribs from. Initially, this didn’t seem like it would be an issue, as Myles and others told me at PAX East that they would doing so.
When things turned sour, I wrote, but chose not to post a write-up detailing why I thought Ming deserved credit. At the time I would just have been starting drama, and I figured that I might not have the full picture. I suspected that there might be info related to Penguin and Panda that might make Myles feel he could not credit Ming in a fair manner without opening himself up to a lawsuit, something I was dead on the money about.
However, as Myles and Ming have now both made their sides of the story clear, and for public viewing, I no longer feel that I’m either out of the loop, or misinformed as to the thoughts and feelings of the primary actors here. While some of the information presented has caused me to carefully reconsider my own thoughts and run them past those more familiar with the industry, I’m ultimately still convinced that Ming deserves Game Designer credit on Power Well.
Disclosures
My name is John Wallace, and I often go by Fritz. I’m the primary writer/owner of Gametrodon. I don’t work in the game industry on any level, but I do have a few contacts and connections with those who do.
The extent of my connections with the two primary folks involved here, Brother Ming and Myles Martin are as follows:
1. I’ve interviewed Brother Ming previously about the nature of fan projects, mostly in regards to Mihoyo and their policies. I also reached out to him for some clarification on statements made prior to posting this writeup, and prior to the release of his public response.
2. I chatted briefly with Myles Martin at PAX East this year about Power Well, and played a demo. I was planning to reach out to get his point of view right before he put up a 8000 word public statement on Sunday.
Neither Myles nor Ming have debated the authenticity of the messages posted.
However, for pretty obvious reasons, they have fairly different takes and feelings about the nature of the interactions, and characterize them quite differently.
I’ve taken backups of these statements, but linked to the source. Should that source go down, I will be hosting the statements myself. This article was written with the content as it was on 9/22/2024 for Myles Statement, and 9/25/2024 for Brother Ming’s statement.
Updates/Revisions:
Any changes/updates to this post made after it has gone live will be noted here.
5/15/2025 Update: Both of these games were at PAX East 2025, and are gearing up to move into launching Kickstarters possibly in the next year, so I’ll be quietly observing. In the event that the original source of the statements are removed/changed, I’ll be putting up my backups, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue yet.
